Judy Garland_ Investigating the Death of a Hollywood Superstar _ Our History

Judy Garland spent her life singing about bluebirds, but she died without ever finding them. She was found dead on the bathroom floor early Sunday morning. There is a new star in the heaven. Young, fresh, beautiful. Judy Garland was one of the world's most recognized talents. Her career had spanned generations, from child star to superstar. From her classic role in The Wizard of Oz, to her seminal performance in A Star is Born. She packed movie theaters and concert halls with her extraordinary voice. She was known for her tremendous talent, but also for her turbulent lifestyle and stormy love life. But on the morning of June 22, 1969, Judy Garland was found dead in her London home, aged just 47. The sudden death of one of the most famous women on the planet sparked rumor and speculation. There are reports of an overdose of drugs, but it is not confirmed. Now, forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Hunter is taking a fresh look at the death of this Hollywood icon. The coroner's report states that Judy Garland died of an overdose of prescription medications. But was this an act of suicide? A tragic accident? Or was there something more mysterious that caused the demise of this Hollywood superstar? World-renowned forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Hunter has conducted thousands of autopsies. He's the chief medical examiner in one of America's biggest cities and has been investigating suspicious deaths for nearly 20 years. These are the medical documents related to Judy's autopsy. And together with other information I've gathered, I'm hoping to separate the facts from the wild speculation and finally reveal what really caused the death of Judy Garland. March 15, 1969. London, England. Three months before her death. Judy Garland is marrying husband number five, nightclub promoter and musician Mickey Deans. On the face of it, this appears to be the happiest day of her life, but her smiles hide a darker story. At 46, Judy is desperately trying to revive her flagging career as she's struggling under the pressure of mounting debts. Judy's lifelong friend, Anne Edwards, is there to hold her hand. Judy's wedding to Mickey was probably one of the worst days of my life. There was only about 20 of us and she grabbed my hand and she said, don't let go of me. And she spoke to those reporters with me stuck on the side of her. She looked atrocious. She was so ill-looking. It was a terrible, terrible scene. If it was in a film, they would have cut it. Judy's love life was stormy, and her last four marriages all ended in divorce. The musician David Rose, director Vincent Minnelli, her manager and producer Sid Luft, and actor Mark Herron. Friends and family thought this marriage might go the same way. Even her children, including Liza Minnelli, didn't attend. The kids did talk to her on the phone occasionally, but she wasn't a part of their everyday life anymore. She was disappointed that they weren't there. She was very maternal. Her kids really adored her. But she was torn because she had a life that kind of pulled her away from them quite often. Judy Garland was born Frances Baby Gum on June 10, 1922. The third daughter of vaudevillian parents Ethel and Frank Gum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. Judy made her stage debut aged just two and a half during a Christmas performance. It was just that natural ability and of course the urge to perform. Judy and her sisters were managed by their mother Ethel. In 1967, Judy was interviewed by Barbara Walters alongside two of her children, Lorna and Joey Luft. My mother was truly a stage mother. A mean one, wasn't she? She was very jealous because she had absolutely no talent. She would sort of stand in the wings when I was a little girl and if I didn't feel good, if I was sick to my tummy, she'd say, you get out and sing or I'll wrap you around the bedpost and break you off short. So I'd go out and sing. When Judy was just 13, Louis B. Mayer, the then boss of MGM, heard her sing and immediately signed her up. Looking at news reports and photographs of Judy in her early days at MGM, it's pretty clear that she did have some cosmetic work done. She was in her early teens when she had a non-surgical nose job and that was where rubberized discs were placed within her nostril to change their appearance. Judy's great friend, Ann Edwards, was also at MGM. Well, the other kids that she had around her was Elizabeth Taylor, you know, Lana Turner, all these were beautiful young girls still in their teens, so that gave her a tremendous complex to carry through her entire life, never got rid of it. If you want to destroy someone's confidence, you tell them that they don't fit in. Judy had this from day dot. Very early on, she's getting the message that, you know what, you're not good enough and we have to change you. By the time she was an adolescent, it was reported that her waist was brutally corseted and that her breasts were bound with tape. She also had removable caps on her teeth. Judy's father did his best to shield her from the pressures of performing. But shortly after she joined MGM, he passed away. I think Judy really grieved for Frank for the entire rest of her life. She never had another person in her life who gave back to her so much love, so much affection. Without the support of her father, her mother and the studio pushed Judy relentlessly. The result was 17-year-old Judy's career-defining performance in The Wizard of Oz. Once she made The Wizard of Oz, her career took a different spin, totally. She was really a big star. She became Dorothy to everyone. On the face of it, Judy Garland was a Hollywood superstar. But behind that Hollywood veneer, there was something else that was going on. Looking at the reports, I see that Judy was losing her hair toward the end of her life. And that's an indication that there was something very wrong. One explanation for hair loss is simply stress. May 1969, New York City. One month before Judy's death. Judy arrives in New York with her new husband, Mickey Deans. Heavily in debt, they can't afford to stay in a hotel. So their friend, musician Charles Cochran, offers them his spare room. I think she had troubles paying her bills, to be perfectly honest. She was pretty broke by that particular time. Judy and Mickey are desperately hoping to secure a deal for a chain of movie theaters to be named after her. She wasn't the star that she had been before. She was performing for $150 in little nightclubs. Judy had in fact earned over $10 million during her career. Around $65 million in today's money. But she had nothing to show for it. Miss Judy Garland. And her husband and producer, Mr. Sid Luft. The money was always managed by those around her, including her third husband, Sid Luft. She told me once, I'll never forget it. I can almost cry when I think of it. Sid owns everything that I am. I can't even die unless he tells me to. She had the bills and he had the money. John Meyer was Judy's boyfriend a couple of years before she died. Judy did not want to deal with money. She said that was unfeminine. She would leave every negotiation in the hands of some male figure who would negotiate for Judy and then keep all the money. Judy tried to push money worries aside, but there's evidence she may have found it hard to cope with other areas of her life. Looking at the pathologist's testimony during the inquest, I can see that there are reports of slash marks on Judy's wrist. So, could Judy's death be the result of a suicide? In all, it's said that Judy made something like between 25 and 30 suicide attempts over the years. A couple of these alleged attempts were after the births of her daughters, Liza Minnelli and Lorna Luft, when it's said she suffered from postpartum depression. But it was usually a superficial cut. It was really more cries for help. She said many times over the years that she didn't have a death wish. When I look more closely at the coroner's report, it states that the slashes on Judy's wrist were, in fact, healed scars. So, she didn't die by cutting her wrist, but were these earlier suicide attempts an indication of what ultimately killed Judy Garland? May 1969, New York City, one month before Judy's death. Judy and Mickey are meeting investors, hoping to have a chain of movie theaters named after her. Heavily in debt, they are desperate for the deal to go through, so Judy puts on a great performance. Dr. Hunter has found something in Judy's records that could have helped her to put on a brave face. Looking at numerous news reports and testimonies from people who knew Judy, it's clear that she, over a long period of time, used multiple prescription medications. The most significant of these is amphetamine, also known as speed, uppers, pep pills. It's a synthetic stimulant. They increase breathing and heart rate, and the users tend to feel more alert, energetic, and confident. Was this a long-term addiction, or was this some sort of short-term fix? At MGM, Judy made around 30 feature films, sometimes working 18-hour days, six days a week. The MGM factory churned out film after film after film, from Easter Parade and Me and My Gal to Meet Me in St. Louis. The studio had a technique to keep their actors working hard. Judy was introduced early on to Benzedrine, which was the amphetamine given to her and Mickey Rooney. As soon as they got to the set, this would perk them up and keep them moving. By her late teens, Judy had become addicted to amphetamines. When she was just 19, she collapsed at the studios. Instead of being told to rest, the doctors prescribed her more amphetamines. Prescribing a person amphetamines after they've collapsed from exhaustion is incredibly irresponsible. It can do great harm to the body and push an already fatigued system into working overtime. Her reliance on these pills came to a head when Judy was 26. During the filming of Annie Get Your Gun, she was becoming increasingly erratic. She would either not show up, or she would show up and not come out of her dressing room for a long time. She kept everybody waiting. The studio fired Judy. After 16 years in the MGM family, she was on her own. Her dependency on pills intensified. I can see that at this point in Judy's life, she wasn't taking just amphetamines. She was using a cocktail of different prescription medications, including tranquilizers and painkillers. Did this mixture of drugs ultimately cause her death? One of my misguided efforts to help Judy was to try to control her pill intake. I would keep them and dole them out as I think she needed them, and she began to resent this. Judy's addiction to pills became so great that in desperate moments, she would literally take anything. June 1969, New York City, two weeks before Judy's death. Judy is staying with her friend Charles and runs out of pills. Oh my goodness, I remember, you know, I had a dog who had mange problems. So I had a whole bunch of mange pills, and I'm afraid that Judy did get into those. From witness statements, I can tell that in the weeks leading up to her death, Judy's random pill taking was putting her into serious danger. Later that day, Judy is joined at the apartment by Charles and friends Anita O'Day and Claire Hogan. High on a cocktail of pills, she's unpredictable. She was so volatile, and one moment she could be this charming, sexy, feminine creature, the next moment she could turn into the worst shrew you had ever encountered. Anita has had enough of Judy's behavior. Suddenly, Judy passes out. She is completely unresponsive, and it takes Claire and Charles around six hours to get her to wake up. She was very shaken by what had happened, and said, oh my God, I don't think anybody realized quite the seriousness of what was going on, or something would have been done, because we all cared about her. The drugs in Judy's life, according to reports, were so ubiquitous that they became, I guess, sort of one of the biggest tools she had to cope. It may very well be that she saw medication and self-medicating as a means of escaping pain, escaping fear, escaping whatever it was that she was coping with. This polypharmacy, or her mixing of drugs, can be very dangerous, and can even be fatal. However, on the night that she died, there were no amphetamines, tranquilizers, or painkillers found in her system. But the fact that she was so reliant on them raises other alarm bells. As well as being used as uppers, amphetamines are also used as appetite suppressants or diet pills. We have no records of Judy's post-mortem weight, but it was estimated that she weighed anywhere between 85 and 90 pounds. And at 4 foot 11 inches, that gives her a body mass index of 17, which means that she is severely underweight and likely malnourished. This leads me to ask the question, did Judy have an eating disorder? Judy's issues with her weight started when she joined MGM. Well, Louis B. Mayer, he said, oh my God, what are we going to do with her? You know, she's this short, stodgy, you know, fat little girl. The studio was already giving Judy amphetamines to stay awake, but those same pills also helped suppress her appetite. They wanted, you know, Judy to stay camera thin. That meant 90, 95 pounds, and nobody saw the harm in it, or the long-term effects of what those were doing. Aside from the pills, the studio monitored everything Judy ate. Everybody else around her would be getting hamburgers and french fries and whatever else they were serving that day, and she would be served chicken broth. On top of broth, Judy's diet consisted of black coffee, four packs of cigarettes, and pills every four hours. The studio kept an eye on Judy to make sure she stuck to her regime. A diet like this would clearly have a huge impact on Judy's health. It would deprive her body of receiving essential nutrients. In her final weeks, Judy's friend Charles noticed her unusual eating habits. She could have three milkshakes and just devour them, and a chocolate cake, and then not eat anything for several days. Sometimes, if she were disciplined, she would have chicken breast with the skin removed. She was very, very conscious that she did not want to gain weight again. With Judy Garland, there was never just a kind of comfortable, I'm hungry, I'll eat, I'm full, I'll stop. It was such an unhealthy, complex relationship, not just with food, but with weight and her body as well. Denying herself a healthy diet would have made Judy weaker and less able to fight, say, infection or even stress. At this stage, I can't rule out that her diet, as well as her weight, could have been a contributing factor in her death. June 1969, London, England. Judy is back from New York and gets a call about the business deal. What did he say? They decided not to go along with using Judy for these theaters. I think it was a big disappointment, no question about it. Bye. June 18th, 1969, four days before Judy's death. Despite the devastating news, Judy and her husband, Mickey, continue with public engagements. They've been invited by their friends, Jackie Trent and Tony Hatch, to attend the grand opening of a menswear shop in London. Judy's drink of choice is vodka and pineapple. I have here information from Judy's doctor pertaining to a potentially lethal condition. He reports that eight years prior to her death, she actually had cirrhosis of the liver. Cirrhosis is scarring of the liver brought on by long-term liver damage. The buildup of scar tissue can interfere with the flow of blood to the liver, which can stop its functioning. This damage can be irreversible and fatal. The most common cause of cirrhosis is alcohol abuse. Now, if Judy had been abusing alcohol and taking prescription medications, this would have been a lethal cocktail. I never saw her drink too much. It was always the prop. While we were freshening our drinks and having three or four, she would barely have finished one. In fact, the coroner's report states there's no alcohol in Judy's system when she died and there's no obvious effects of long-term alcohol abuse. So, if alcohol didn't cause her liver damage, the next most common cause for cirrhosis is a hepatitis. Judy Garland is reported recovering today in a Hong Kong hospital from a mysterious illness. Judy's mysterious illness was hepatitis. The virus attacks the liver and it's reported that Judy's liver swelled to four times its normal size. Inflammation of the liver hinders its ability to perform vital functions such as processing blood and filtering toxins, which prevent damage to the rest of the body. Hepatitis could have seriously weakened Judy's system and therefore endangered her other organs. Singer came out of a coma after receiving oxygen and other emergency treatment, but she still couldn't speak. She was told that she was going to be a semi-invalid was what they told her. And she responded with, well, that's only half bad. She was told by the doctors that she would very likely not sing again. Against all the odds, Judy found her voice and delivered one of her most successful career-defining performances at Carnegie Hall just a year later. It was really sensational. Her voice was great. Her personality was great. Everyone went crazy there. Even though Judy did have obvious injury to her liver from her hepatitis episode, there's no evidence in the autopsy of long-term fibrosis or cirrhosis. So I think we can rule this out as a possible cause of death. But given the hepatitis as well as her prescription drug abuse, it's likely that her liver was not in the best condition when she died. June 19th, 1969. Judy has just three days to live. Judy and Mickey are renting a small house in London. Despite having recently collapsed in New York, Judy is once again taking prescription medication. Judy, Judy, come on. Mickey called me, so I ran over there. Judy, Judy. She's breathing. Mickey didn't want me to call the paramedics. He didn't want her to get out that anything was going to be wrong with her. There was a big, big fight between us at that point. Anyway, we did call the paramedics and they came and took care of her, thank God. So were Judy's collapses a sign of things to come? Dr. Hunter has discovered something in her autopsy that meant she was dangerously close to the edge. Judy had physical scars from gambling with her life, and she was taking multiple prescription medications. I found something else in the coroner's report that I believe gets me closer to finally determining what actually killed Judy Garland. June 21st, 1969. London, England. Less than ten hours before her death. After a turbulent couple of weeks, Judy and Mickey spend a relaxing day together. In the early evening, Philip Roberge, Mickey's 29-year-old American friend, comes over to see him. Hi, Judy. I'm going to leave you guys to it. Judy makes her excuses and goes upstairs without eating dinner. Mickey and Philip eat their meal and catch up, while Judy gets ready for bed. It has been reported that there are two bottles of barbiturates found on Judy's bedside table. Barbiturates work by depressing the central nervous system, relaxing every part of the body. They slow normal brain function, creating a state of intoxication similar to the effects of alcohol. Barbiturates are such strong sedatives, and they're rarely prescribed these days. They're hugely addictive, they're easy to overdose on, and there's simply no room for error. So were barbiturates another one of the many tablets that Judy was addicted to? Judy was first introduced to barbiturates at MGM. They would be so loaded up on amphetamines, they couldn't go to sleep, so then it was time for a sleeping pill. Very often she would be working 14, 15, 16 hours a day, and she would sleep two or three hours, and then she would come back and perform again. I don't think the studio really had any idea what buppers and downers could do at that time. The damaging effects of this erratic sleep cycle continued until Judy's death. Judy would keep you up 36 hours a day, you'd never get any sleep. In order to keep you up, she would turn the radio on full force, she would keep the lights on. 9 p.m. Judy takes some sleeping pills. Her publicist, Matthew West, calls to make plans for the next day. He said she sounded happy and serene. 11.50 p.m. Mickey joins his wife in bed. This is the last time he will see Judy alive. Judy was known to take sleeping pills and then wake up a few hours later and take some more, not realizing how many she was taking. Judy can't sleep. Between midnight and 2 a.m., she takes some more Seconol, a type of sleeping pill, and gets up. Normally, any one of these pills would have sent someone to sleep, but over time Judy has developed tolerance to it, which means that she must use more in order to get the same effect. We know that taking downers to go to sleep and uppers to wake up is incredibly dangerous. It's no surprise that sleep deprivation is used as a torture technique. We need it. In fact, if we don't sleep enough, it plays havoc with you emotionally, cognitively, physically. Judy needs the toilet and makes her way down the corridor to the bathroom. She locks the door behind her. Still wide awake, Judy takes another sleeping tablet. Alone in the bathroom, it's believed that at around 2.30 a.m., Judy falls asleep. 10.40 a.m., June 22, 1969. Mickey is woken by a call from Charles Cochran, who wants to speak to Judy. But she hasn't returned from the bathroom. Mickey goes down the corridor, but the bathroom door is locked, and there's no reply from Judy. Unable to get in through the door, Mickey climbs out the window and makes his way to the bathroom. He sees Judy slumped on the toilet. Mickey tries to wake Judy up, but she is unresponsive. He picks her up. She's stiff and cold, and then she appears to exhale a large breath. When Mickey found Judy on the toilet, it was clear that rigor mortis had already set in. Rigor mortis is the stiffening of the skeletal muscles because of a chemical reaction occurring after death. Mickey also heard Judy exhale a breath, which is actually quite common following death. It's just where gases have built up, and it's released through the airway. Added to that, we know that she had bloody fluid emanating from her nose and her mouth. And in retrospect, I think it's clear that she'd been dead for several hours before Mickey found her in that bathroom. Mickey places Judy back on the toilet. He rushes downstairs to call for an ambulance. 10.50 a.m. Paramedics and police arrive at the house. They check her vital signs, but it's too late. There is nothing they can do to save Judy. At around 11 a.m. on June 22, 1969, Judy Garland is pronounced dead. The world mourns the shocking passing of this legendary entertainer. Judy Garland was found dead on the bathroom floor early Sunday morning. There are reports of an overdose of drugs, but it is not confirmed. I mean, I had known her since I was four and a half years old, and I really was terribly fond of her. After the autopsy was carried out, Judy's body was flown to New York. Her funeral took place on June 27, 1969. She was just well loved. It was of a singing voice, a speaking voice. It was a national and an international mourning. The outpouring of fans and her supporters and followers over the years was very apparent when 22,000 people lined the streets of New York City and filed past her coffin to pay tribute. So was Judy's death a successful suicide, an accidental overdose of sleeping pills, or was she hiding a darker secret? The coroner's report states that 4.9 milligrams of quinobarbitone, which is a barbiturate, was found in Judy's blood. This is a very high amount. At first glance, it appears that Judy's death is from an overdose of sleeping tablets. But she'd been taking these sleeping tablets for decades. So how could she have got it so wrong on this occasion? Quinobarbitone was one of the most common drugs used for suicide in America. So, did Judy use this medication as a means to end her own life? She was at a really bad place in her life. She was homeless, she was broke, she was really at the lowest of lows, and people just assumed that she probably did finally succeed in taking her own life. Of course, we know that that's not how she looked at life. She said, I wish people would stop talking about my comebacks and my unhappiness. Maybe it will distress a lot of people, but I've had an awfully nice life. I think it will surprise a lot of people who kind of like to think of you as a... Tragedy. You know, the poor little rich girl. She was always made out to be just this daughter of tragedy. But she was happy and goofy and fun, and she had a self-deprecating sense of humor that a lot of people don't necessarily know about. If Judy had intended to kill herself, I would have expected to see a large quantity of drugs in her stomach. However, we know that 4.9 milligrams of quinobarbitone was found in the blood rather than in the stomach. Therefore, it's clear to me that she was taking repeated small doses of quinobarbitone over a long time versus a large dose all at once. Therefore, I don't believe that Judy took a massive overdose in order to end her life. She wanted to see herself come back and wanted to see herself make it again and to be what she once was, and she was working toward that. So if we rule out suicide, did Judy die of an accidental overdose? Judy had been habituated to barbiturates over a long period of time. So Judy would have needed to take more medications in order to get to sleep. However, it is notoriously easy to overdose on barbiturates. Just one more pill can mean the difference between life and death. While Dr. Hunter believes an overdose of barbiturates contributed to Judy's death, he also believes that it was not the only thing that killed her. For me, the key to Judy's death lies in her physical appearance. The report shows that she's painfully thin, her hair is falling out, and it's reported that her teeth were rotting. These are clear signs of malnutrition. The autopsy also refers to her being dehydrated and that her stomach was empty. This combined with Judy's lifelong addiction to amphetamines, which is oftentimes used as an appetite suppressant, makes me question whether Judy had a serious eating disorder. Judy was very secretive around food. She wouldn't want to have others watch her eat. When she did eat, she'd either starve herself or she'd binge eat and she couldn't stop. These are signs of an eating disorder. From the reports that I've seen, it's very likely that she had bulimia. It may have been that she was never diagnosed, but clearly she had a very unhealthy relationship with food, and indeed it seems her body and body image. Sometimes she would go a day and a half without food, without eating. She was running on nervous energy, and it just didn't occur to her to stop her life for any extraneous reason, like feeding herself. Dr. Hunter believes he can now piece together the reason for Judy's death. Judy's addiction to prescription medications was already overworking a system that was under huge stress from a likely eating disorder. Her body would have struggled in its fight to survive, and the vital organs, particularly the heart, would have been weakened and been unable to cope. When Judy took the quinobarbitone on the night that she died, it was absorbed into the bloodstream, slowing her breathing. This in turn meant her heart had to pump harder to push more blood around her body. Her oxygen levels dropped, and fluid built up in her lungs causing pulmonary edema. As a result of the pulmonary edema, her vital organs, including her brain and heart, were starved of oxygen. The great talent of our generation, Miss Judy Garland. Judy Garland will be remembered for the wonderful legacy that she has left us, the music, the movies. She had a great human quality, and that's really what made her the great, great star that she was. There was no one like Judy. I don't know of anyone who could be as funny as Judy and as warm. She was like the most fascinating person that you could ever meet in a million years. Great talent just as a human being. And like nobody on the planet that I've ever crossed paths with.